Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to data object tagging and more particularly to tag management for data objects in an object store.
Description of the Related Art
A data store offers an organized mechanism for storing, managing and retrieving information. Data stores exist in the most rudimentary form of a flat file in which each line of the file is a record and each number or string separated by a pre-determined delimiter is a field of the record. More advanced data stores organize data through the use of structured tables able to be managed by way of a database management system (“DBMS”). Modern data stores are organized through a number of different technological paradigms, including relational models (relational database), object models (object database), document models (document database), and the like. In most cases, the structure and organization of data in the data store (namely the different tables, and records and fields defined therein) conform to a pre-defined schema intended to model a problem and/or solution evidenced by the database.
Objects in a data store are often viewed according to a pre-configured paradigm. The pre-configured paradigm in many instances is dictated at design time by the application designer and hard coded into the application itself. With the advent of the Internet and the search engine, the notion of the ad hoc organization of data into a dynamically produced result set has become commonplace. Today, the most common end user enjoys access to query-driven result set creation from amongst a vast sea of objects. Yet, even considering the power of the modern search engine, end users are still restricted to the naming parameters of searched objects and the metadata associated therewith.
Object tagging is a concept that allows individuals to apply a name or characterization to an object that has a different named assigned thereto at the time of creation. Tagging initially enjoyed wide scale utilization in the field of social bookmarking and since has become part and parcel of many advanced enterprise computing systems in which a large number of data objects subsist and require varied query based access by different end users of the system. Yet, the ad hoc tagging of objects suffers from tag variations that occur as a result of tags being applied to the same object or object type over a long period of time, or as a result of tags being applied to the same object or object type by a multiplicity of end users.
What results is an object with both fresh tags and stale tags. Replacing the stale tags with fresh tags is a manually intensive process that requires the individual to mentally consider the relevance and freshness of both an old and new tag in order to determine whether or not to replace the old tag with the new, or to permit both tags to exist for a single object or object type.